07 Apr The Health of Your Mind May Reside in Your Stomach
The incredible impact probiotics have on our brains
Mandy’s parents were running out of hope, their teenage daughter had been diagnosed with obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) and ADHD. They had taken her to clinics around the country in an effort to thwart to help her. It seemed like nothing, not even the litany of psychotropic medications, made much of a difference.
When they arrived at my Vancouver clinic, Mandy’s parents had only one request: help us help Mandy.
I started by posing the usual questions about Mandy’s background, her childhood, and the onset of her illness. But then he asked a question that no psychiatrist ever had: How was Mandy’s gut? Did she suffer digestive upset? Constipation or diarrhea? Acid reflux? Had Mandy’s digestion seemed to change at all before or during her illness? Her parents looked at each other. The answer to many of the doctor’s questions was, indeed, “Yes.”
That’s what prompted me to take an underlying approach: besides the necessary essential fatty acids and dietary changes, I also prescribed Mandy a twice-daily dose of probiotics, the array of helpful bacteria that lives in our gut. The change in Mandy was nothing short of miraculous: within six months, her symptoms had greatly diminished. One year after beginning her naturopathic protocol and the probiotic prescription, there was no sign that Mandy had ever been ill.
Her parents may have been stunned, but to me, Mandy’s case was an obvious one. An imbalance in the microbes in Mandy’s gut was either contributing to, or causing, her mental symptoms. “The gut is really your second brain. There are more neurons in the GI tract than anywhere else except the brain,” is my most iterated comment.
No longer is addressing intestinal health a provocative idea — that psychiatric woes can be helped by targeting the digestive system — is increasingly reinforced by cutting-edge science. For decades, researchers have known of the connection between the brain and the gut. Anxiety often causes nausea and diarrhea, and depression can change appetite. The connection may have been established, but scientists thought communication was one way: it traveled from the brain to the gut, and not the other way around.
But now, a new understanding of the trillions of microbes living in our guts reveals that this communication process is more like a multi-lane superhighway than a one-way street. By showing that changing bacteria in the gut can change behavior, this new research might one day transform the way we understand and treat a variety of mental health disorders.
For Naturopathic Physicians, this ‘radical’ treatment protocol has actually been decades in the making. For more than 20 years I have recognized the connection between body and mind is more important than conventional medicine assumed. Each year, I get more and more impressed at how important the GI tract is for healthy mood and behavior. On average, more than half of my patients’ complaints are associated with problems in the gut.
This solution might strike many as simple, but it actually targets a vast realm of the human body: around 90 percent of our cells are actually bacterial, and bacterial genes outnumber human genes by a factor of 99 to 1. But those bacteria, most of which perform helpful functions, weren’t always with us: a baby is essentially sterile until it enters the birth canal, at which point the bacteria start to arrive — and they don’t stop. From a mother’s vaginal microbes to hugs and kisses from relatives, the exposures of newborns and toddlers in their earliest years is critical to the development of a robust microbiome.
“There are changes that happen early in life that we can’t reverse,” said John Cryan, a neuroscientist at the University of Cork in Ireland and a main investigator at the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre. “But there are some changes that we can reverse. It tells us that there is a window when microbes are having their main effects and, until this closes, many changes can be reversed.”
Even if our gut bacteria carries the biggest influence when we’re young, experts are still convinced that tweaking these bacteria later in life can yield profound behavioral and psychological changes. In a recent study,
anxious mice dosed with the probiotic bacterium Lactobacillus rhamnosus showed lower levels of anxiety, decreased stress hormones, and even an increase in brain receptors for a neurotransmitter that’s vital in curbing worry, anxiety, and fear.
John Bienenstock, a co-author on that study, compared the probiotics’ effects to benzodiazepines like Valium and Xanax. “The similarity is intriguing. It doesn’t prove they both use the same pathway [in the brain], but it’s a possibility.”
Although plenty of questions remain and we need to be cautious to not conclude that all our mental woes will respond to probiotic treatment as dramatically as Mandy’s, the benefits of using probiotics to treat human behavior are becoming increasingly obvious and their potential to treat human behavior is increasingly apparent.
Certainly a comprehensive digestive protocol is worth pursuing in an effort to improve people’s lives.